Can anyone fix Britain’s broken immigration system?
Anna Sonny, 8 August 2014
In the past week or so, the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems have all set out policies on immigration. After the European elections earlier this year saw the historic triumph of Ukip, whose tough anti-immigration stance helped gained them 24 MEPs, it seems Britain’s major political parties are out to try and neutralise the threat.
In an article for the Daily Telegraph, David Cameron announced that the period of time EU migrants can claim welfare payments for will be reduced from six months to three (after an initial three-month waiting period). In an attempt to appeal to any voters who might be tempted to back Ukip at the general election next year, he declared: ‘You cannot expect to come to Britain and get something for nothing.’
To voters who are genuinely concerned about immigrants abusing the welfare system, I’m not sure what difference a few months will make. If the problem in the first place is the policy itself, that is, the very fact that people can come here and get something for nothing by claiming benefits (while simultaneously taking all our jobs, according to Ukip), then a few months here and there will not do much to allay these fears.
Labour opted for a tougher stance on the issue, with Rachel Reeves, Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, saying immigrants should be denied benefits in the first place until they have contributed through the tax system. But the ‘free movement of labour’ pillar of EU law specifies that a member state cannot treat EU citizens any differently to its own.
Reeves did suggest ‘working with our partners in Europe to reform the system’ or changing the system ‘so it is better based on contributions’ – but this would also have to include British citizens. Either way, suggesting policies that can’t actually be implemented at the moment isn’t the most helpful approach to calming fears about immigration.
In a speech earlier this week, Nick Clegg highlighted the specific problem with the self-employment loophole, designed to allow in entrepreneurs who wouldn’t be a threat to British jobs and who might create jobs themselves. 60,000 Romanians and Bulgarians were already working here ahead of the transitional controls being lifted in January this year; they were registered as self-employed but were taking low-paid jobs. Clegg sensibly suggests removing the loophole, lengthening the transition period depending on the size of the country and putting brakes on future migration if needed.
The language of the Tories and Labour focuses solely on immigrants taking advantage of the system. Desperate immigrants who register as self-employed but take low-paid jobs have to give up sick pay and leave – nobody benefits from this except the employers who get cheap labour and this is what undercuts British workers. Instead of coming up with policies that paint immigrants as welfare abusers and job stealers, why not come up with a policy that will fix the system? It is clearly broken.
The central problem with immigration is not the lowering of wages, the competition for jobs, healthcare and homes, important as those are for the individual, but the change in the nature of a society by mass immigration see – http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/the-non-economic-costs-of-mass-immigration-to-the-uk/.
The most fundamental choice a people have to make in a democracy is the decision about who shall be allowed to join their society. The native population of the UK have been denied that. If they had been allowed to make the choice the British, does anyone honestly believe they would have voted for the post-1945 mass immigration? This immigration has been forced upon the British by a white liberal elite, who not only have permitted the immigration but passed more and more oppressive laws to suppress dissent. If you had told the British in 1945 that 60 years later there would be being imprisoned for expressing disagreement with the immigration policies of their government they would have thought you mad,yet that is precisely what is happening.
The enforced mass immigration is made all the more noxious because of the the hypocrisy of the white liberal elite who have promoted mass immigration. I have never known a white pro-immigration advocate who did not organise their lives in such a way as to live in a very white, and in England, very English world – see http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/the-chiles-test-for-white-liberal-racial-hypocrisy/
The response to this might well be that many populations all over the world were denied the democratic decision about who should be allowed to join their society when Britain came and colonised them, and that post-war immigration was necessary to help re-build the country after the war.
Your arguments do not stand up to historical or moral scrutiny, Anna. The fact that Britain had an empire does not mean that the population as a whole at the time of the empire and even less those who came after the empire was no longer there have any moral obligation to allow their own country to suffer what is a surreptitious form of invasion.
For most of the time covered by the empire there was no universal franchise and a majority of the British population today were either children or not born when the empire ended.in the 1960s. Moreover, from the late 19th century British imperial policy was to put native interests first. You also need to ask what would have happened without the empire. The answer is simple, either tribal warfare or another empire such as the Ottoman which would have nee much less gentle in its treatment of the colonial [populations. It is also worth adding that over the past 50 years Britain has paid in 2014 values several hundred billion pounds in Aid.
The other point about the British empire is that in most places, Canada, NZ, SA and Australia are the exceptions, the number of Britons in imperial possessions was tiny. Take India. The 1921 census of the Indian Empire (which included Burma and the states which became Pakistan and Bangladesh) showed a total population of 318,492,480. The total British (white) population was 115,606. This represented 0.036% of the population or one white for every 2755 Asians.
Contrast this with those originating from directly or ultimately from the subcontinent:
The total population of the UK in the 2001 census was 58.8 million (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=455)
This is a graph showing Population of the United Kingdom: by ethnic group, April 2001
The majority of the UK population in 2001 were White (92 per cent). The remaining 4.6 million (or 7.9 per cent) people belonged to other ethnic groups. There were 2,083,759 people of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi origin . This represents 3.5% of the population of Britain or one subcontinental Asian for every 28 whites. The figures must have been significantly understated because of illegal immigration and the fact that the census relied on self-reporting of racial type. In addition, it is probable that quite a few of the “Mixed” and “Other Asian” categories – who comprise 924,781 individuals – have some sub-continental ancestry. The true 2001 total of sub-continental Asians may well have been nearer 3 million than 2 million.
More fundamentally, at the level of biology homo sapiens is highly territorial. All organisms including Man obey the evolutionary imperative of acquire scarce resources at all costs. The control of a territory is the most efficient way of doing that. Hence, human beings will always, consciously or unconsciously, attempt to do just that. All wars are ultimately about scarce resources and the most about territory.
As for your claim that immigrants were needed to rebuild Britain after 1945 this is factually wrong. They were employed simply as cheap labour. At the same time these immigrants were arriving, the British government was happy to promote immigration from the UK by giving support to schemes such as the £10 Pom passage to Australia developed by the Australian government. There was no British general labour shortage and most of the immigrants from the Commonwealth who came in before the 1965 Act to restrict their entry were unskilled, poorly educated and doing jobs the British would have done (for higher wages) if the immigrants had not been available.
If democracy means anything it means deciding who shall and shall not be part of the society the democracy covers. That is all I am arguing.